Work like this has attracted more than a thousand of the best scientific
and technical minds from around the world. (Whereas Xerox PARC, in its
heyday, employed about 300 all told, NIST's research staff alone totals
about 1,700.) It has also meant that the agency, whether by default or
design, has become a repository of technological odds and ends. This makes
walking through the Boulder or Gaithersburg campus seem like a visit to
a national wildlife refuge for science geeks. While somebody upstairs is
figuring out how much heat a burning chair releases, somebody downstairs
is finding out how sticky he can make a polymer.

But NIST's work is almost universally praised by scientists and academics,
who say it's an essential font of data, technique, and innovation at a
time when major companies are cutting their own basic science efforts.
"It used to be places like Bell Labs did what we do," says NIST researcher
Eric Cornell. "Their day is passing."

Caltech physicist David Goodstein agrees: "Companies like Boeing, AT&T,
and Hughes supported big facilities doing fundamental research. Today,
most of those labs have shut down or been scaled back." Without NIST, Goodstein
believes, the US would not be a tech leader.

Where NIST comes in for criticism is around the edges of its research.
And this year, with a new administration in the White House, that faultfinding
has turned to action. After years of ideological quarreling in Congress
over NIST's precise role, George W. Bush's budget blueprint this March
called for a "reassessment" of the agency's cash grant program, initiated
in the 1980s
to support advance-guard research that businesses wouldn't support themselves.
The blueprint wiped out funds for new grants, effectively killing the program,
which accounts for one-quarter of NIST's budget.

NIST fills a research void left by yesterday's R&D giants. One creation: a substance whose atoms move so slowly that it's the coldest thing in the universe.

NIST insiders are firm that no Congress would dare cripple the agency at
its core - the basic mandate of making our clocks synchronize and our inches
match up is not likely to be contested. What will be the object of worried
debate, as winds shift in Washington, is whether NIST's labs should continue
to be a haven for cutting-edge research and attempt to fill the void left
by yesterday's R&D giants.

NIST has always been an absolutist kind of place. With its standard-setting
platinum-iridium meter bars and kilogram nuggets stored in safes, this
institution worships accuracy. And US businesses depend on its piety.

The extreme ultraviolet consortium, for instance, a group of chipmakers
and laboratories that includes Intel and AMD, is relying on NIST to help
the semiconductor industry boost the power of its microchips. The EUV
consortium
hopes to increase transistor density by using ultraviolet wavelengths as
narrow as 13.4 nanometers to print designs on chips. But for EUV technology
to work, the stepper optics - mirrors and lenses that reduce a big image
into a minuscule one that will fit on a chip - have to be within a few
atoms of perfection to avoid distorting the image; the smoothness of the
optics' surfaces must be uniform within 1 nanometer.

NIST's Synchrotron Ultraviolet Radiation Facility in Gaithersburg is just
that kind of perfection machine. Shaped like an oversize doughnut, about
6 feet in diameter, SURF III is a particle accelerator that sends electrons
racing around a circle so they'll throw off photons. The resulting light
can be used to measure the quality of the steppers. "When we're comparing
optics for our tool manufacturing in Europe and Japan," says Chuck Gwyn,
an Intel scientist who manages the EUV consortium, "we have to make sure
they're cross-correlated for accuracy and measurement."

And NIST works with other such consortia. Currently, the agency is aiding
the International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association (Idema)
in developing ways to characterize the magnetic properties of disk media
films, some of which are only a couple of atoms thick. NIST will test the
films and their magnetic stability at various thicknesses. Then, in a kind
of round-robin of exactitude, Idema member labs will test them over again,
and again pass the job to NIST. "NIST's measurements will become the gold
standards," says Winthrop Baylies, a founder of Idema and a participant
in the Magnetics Test Task Force. Companies will use the standards to make
sure their products are consistent, configuring their own testing gear
so it's calibrated to NIST's.

Some of NIST's work leads to the outer limits of science and the physical
world. What begins as an attempt to build a fancy scale or ruler can end
up being the basis for a major discovery. This was the case with the
Bose-Einstein
condensate. Since its earliest days at the turn of the last century, NIST
had been keeping the nation's civilian time with a quartz-crystal clock
calibrated to mean solar time. Then, in 1949, it replaced this technology
with its first atomic clock. (Let's face it: Our planet keeps crummy time.
Measuring days - and hours, minutes, seconds - by the revolutions of Earth
on its axis, while glaciers are melting and oceans are changing and the
whole ball is wobbling in its orbit, wasn't good enough for a cult like
NIST.) But counting the 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a cesium 133 atom
that make up each second isn't easy, largely because the atoms create a
distorting Doppler effect as they whiz through the clock's stainless steel
tube. So, in the late 1980s, NIST's future Nobelist Bill Phillips developed
a way of using lasers to apply the brakes to atoms and dampen the Doppler
effect. By 1995, NIST scientist Eric Cornell and University of Colorado
researcher Carl Wieman had built on Phillips' work to create the first
Bose-Einstein condensate, supercoded rubidium, whose atoms move
so slowly that, at about 30 nanokelvin (or billionths of a degree
above absolute zero), it's the coldest thing in the universe.

Now, at NIST's Boulder campus, in research labs known as JILA (the Joint
Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics, operated in conjunction with the
University of Colorado), Cornell is refining the achievement that could
make him the agency's second Nobel Prize winner. Whereas Phillips succeeded
at holding atoms stationary for about a second, Cornell is attempting to
keep them stable indefinitely. (In their normal state, atoms bounce around
so furiously that attempting to study them is like herding ducks.) The
BEC, as the Bose-Einstein condensate is called, is a mass of atoms that
are so stable they tend to act like one big atom - big enough to be almost
visible to the naked eye.